The Big Nowhere

“I like the risk the other way. It gets my juices goin’.”

“You’re a crazy fuck. What do you want? Name it.”

Buzz looked around the room, saw Stompanato at the bar belting a stiff one for guts and solid citizen types giving Mickey surreptitious glances, like he was a zoo gorilla who might bolt his cage. “I want you not to lean on a guy who’s about to make you real mad.”

“What?”

“You know Audrey’s friend Lucy Whitehall?”

Mickey traced an hourglass figure in the air. “Sure. Solly Gelfman’s go

Buzz said, “Hell in a bucket maybe,” saw Mickey going into his patented low simmer—nostrils flaring, jaw grinding, eyes trawling for something to smash—and handed him the half-full Bloody Mary Joh

Buzz said, “Lucy’s shack job’s been squeezing Solly with some dirty pictures. I broke it up, strong-armed the boy a little. Lucy needs a safe place to flop, and I know for a fact that the Greek’s got pals on the West Hollywood Sheriff’s—your pals. I also know he used to push reefer in Dragna territory—which made old Jack D. real mad. Two damn good reasons for you to leave him alone.”

Cohen was gripping his glass with sausage fingers clenched blue-white. “What… kind… of… pictures?”

The big wrong question—Mickey might be talking to Sol Gelfman and get the true ski

Mickey’s hand popped the glass, shards exploding all over the table, tomato juice and vodka spritzing Buzz. Mickey looked at his bloody palm and pressed it flat on the tabletop. When the white linen started to turn red, he said, “The Greek is fucking dead. He is fucking dog food.”

Two waiters had approached; they stood around shuffling their feet. The squarejohns at the next table were making with shocked faces—one old lady with her jaw practically down to her soup. Buzz waved the waiters away, slid next to Cohen and put an arm around his twitching shoulders. “Mickey, you can’t, and you know it. You put out the word that anybody who bucks Jack D. is your friend, and the Greek did that—in spades. Audrey saw me work him over—and she’d know. And the Greek didn’t know how stand-up you are—that your woman’s friends are like kin to you. Mickey, you got to let it go. You got too much to lose. Fix Lucy up with a nice place to stay, someplace where the Greek can’t find her. Make it a mitzvah.”

Cohen took his hand from the table, shook it free of glass slivers and licked lemon goo off his fingers. “Who was in it besides the Greek?”

Buzz showed him his eyes, the loyal henchman who’d never lie; he came up with two gunsels he’d run out of town for crashing Lew the Jew Wershow’s handbook at Paramount. “Bruno Geyer and Steve Katzenbach. Fairies. You go

Cohen snapped his fingers; waiters materialized and stripped the table dervish fast. Buzz sensed wheels turning behind the Mick’s blank face—in his direction. He moved over to cut the man some slack; he stayed deadpan when Mickey said, “Mitzvah, huh? You fucking goyishe shitheel. Where’s Audrey and Lucy now?”

“Out by my car.”

“What’s Solly pay you?”

“A grand.”

Mickey dug in his pants pockets and pulled out a roll of hundreds. He peeled off ten, placed them in a row on the table and said, “That’s the only mitzvah you know from, you hump. But you saved me grief, so I’m matching. Buy yourself some clothes.”

Buzz palmed the money and stood up. “Thanks, Mick.”

“Fuck you. What do you call an elephant who moonlights as a prostitute?”

“I don’t know. What?”

Mickey cracked a big grin. “A two-ton pickup that lays for peanuts.”

“That’s a riot, Mick.”

“Then why ain’t you laughing? Send the girls in now.”

Buzz walked over to the bar, catching Joh

Joh

Buzz said, “I ain’t your pal, you wop cocksucker,” and walked outside, stuffing the remaining hundreds in his shirt pocket, spitting on his necktie and using it to daub the tomato juice stains on his best Oviatt’s worsted. Audrey Anders was standing on the sidewalk watching him. She said, “Nice life you’ve got, Meeks.”

Chapter Four

Part of him knew it was just a dream—that it was 1950, not 1941; that the story would run its course while part of him grasped for new details and part tried to be dead still so as not to disrupt the unraveling.

He was speeding south on 101, wheeling a hot La Salle sedan. Highway Patrol sirens were closing the gap; Kern County scrubland loomed all around him. He saw a series of dirt roads snaking off the highway and hit the one on the far left, figuring the prowl cars would pursue straight ahead or down the middle. The road wound past farmhouses and fruit pickers’ shacks into a box canyon; he heard sirens to his left and right, behind him and in front of him. Knowing any roadway was capture, he downshifted and plowed across furrowed dirt, gaining distance on the wheeirr, wheeirr, wheeirr. He saw stationary lights up ahead and made them for a farmhouse; a fence materialized; he downshifted, swung around in slow second gear and got a perfect view of a brightly lit picture window:

Two men swinging axes at a young blonde woman pressed into a doorway. A half-second flash of an arm severed off. A wide-open mouth smeared with orange lipstick screaming mute.

The dream speeded up.

He made it to Bakersfield; unloaded the La Salle; got paid. Back to San Berdoo, biology classes at JC, nightmares about the mouth and the arm. Pearl Harbor, 4F from a punctured eardrum. No amount of study, cash GTAs or anything can push the girl away. Months pass, and he returns to find out how and why.

It takes a while, but he comes up with a triangle: a missing local girl named Kathy Hudgens, her spurned lover Marty Sidwell—dead on Saipan—questioned by the cops and let go because no body was found. The number-two man most likely Buddy Jastrow, Folsom parolee, known for his love of torturing dogs and cats. Also missing—last seen two days after he tore across the dry cabbage field. The dream dissolving into typescript—criminology texts filled with forensic gore shots. Joining the LASD in ‘44 to know WHY; advancing through jail and patrol duty; other deputies hooting at him for his perpetual all-points want on Harlan “Buddy” Jastrow.

A noise went off. Da

He picked it up. “Skipper?”

“Yeah,” Captain Al Dietrich said. “How’d you know?”

“You’re the only one who calls me.”

Dietrich snorted. “Anyone ever call you an ascetic?”

“Yeah, you.”

Dietrich laughed. “I like your luck. One night as acting watch commander and you get floods, two accident deaths and a homicide. Want to fill me in on that?”

Da

“They left canvassing reports—nothing hot. Bad, huh?”

“The worst I’ve seen.”

Dietrich sighed. “Da

Kathy Hudgens’ mouth and arm were superimposed against the ceiling—in Technicolor. Da